recommended reads

This is the story of Toni, a girl growing up in the 1960s and ′70s and trying to navigate what it means to be gay and Jewish in Montreal. Goliger explains that she “wanted to explore how having the dual identity—marginal identity—can enrich someone. Toni is marginalized to some extent, certainly in the times she is growing up, for her sexuality, but her Jewish identity is something that perplexes her, and she has to wrestle with that as well.”1

InGirl Unwrapped readers follow Toni all the way from her seven-year-old tomboy beginnings, spent mucking about on Mont-Royal, to her first crush at Camp Tikvah to the trials of high school and on to Israel after the Six-Day War. Every stop on her life’s path adds to her complexity as a character. By the time Toni returns home after her travels, she has become more independent, more determined, and she begins to carve out a place for herself in the city. She creates a life that allows her to be true to her passions, her principles, and her roots.

Goliger does an amazing job of taking readers with Toni on this journey: every place and person she describes comes to life in the kind of detail that makes Toni’s story feel as though it might be one’s own memories. Toni’s recollections of her family, neighbours and nemeses, her friends, crushes and girlfriends reveal so much about her—her interpretations of these people tell us at least as much about Toni as about them. On finishing this book, I imagined what it would be like to track Toni down now to find out what has happened in her life in the decades since the close of the story—she’s just one of those characters who ends up feels like someone you once knew.

Hochelaga Revisitedwas an art exhibition at the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), which has become an important centre for culturally diverse artistic expression in Montreal. And while we’ve lost our chance to attend this exhibition in person, we can still check out the bilingual exhibition catalogue from the Montreal Public Libraries Network.

This 2009 exhibition set out to display works by a group of artists interested in exploring “Montreal as First Nations urban territory. Refuting Hochelaga’s vanishing narrative, they depict personal experiences that cast a light on the still existent – yet often ignored and marginalized – Indigenous presence in the city.”1

Histories of the European settlement of Montreal typically include some account of the indigenous village of Hochelaga found by Jacques Cartier in 1535 on what is now the Island of Montreal. He published his description of the village in his Bref Récit et succincte narration de la navigation faite en 1535 et 1536, and it tells of a sizeable village surrounded by fields of corn very near the slopes of Mont-Royal. However, Cartier’s description is considered to be inaccurate and biased by scholars, reflecting as it does “the European perspective on urban planning during the Italian Renaissance.”2 Cartier’s village bears no resemblance to other villages from that time that have been found by archaeologists. Even as he’s reporting on the culture he’s encountered in his voyages, Cartier is already overwriting their culture.

Sadly this tradition of overwriting indigenous culture in Montreal was just getting started. As Ryan Rice points out in his essay in Hochelaga Revisited, “Montreal is a city admired for its melding of old-world sophistication and charm, technological savvy, and multicultural and distinct societies.…However, colonial strategies of erasure and dominant settler narratives have excluded, ignored and removed its original occupants….Hochelaga Revisited reaffirms an enduring indigenous presence….often absent from official histories of this gathering place.”3

No Crystal Stair, set in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in the early 1940s, tells the story of Marion Willow as she tries to give her girls the confidence and refinement they’ll need to rise up in the world, even if she knows that “to be coloured is to be at the bottom of the ladder” in Montreal.

The diverse characters Sarsfield draws in No Crystal Stair are forging their identities and communities in the shadow of the Second World War. The war has taken many men from Montreal households but also created a labour vaccuum, giving Black men access to better quality jobs. The question of what will happen when the soldiers return leaves those workers with little security. And, while Quebec women got the vote in 1940, this is still a Montreal where “No woman, not even the wealthiest woman in Westmount, is permitted to sign for utilities” or sign leases, and widowed Marion must find men in the community to sign for her.

It is, ultimately, the bonds within and without the community that help Marion and her girls to succeed. In fact this story is really more about the community than any one person or family— it’s about Torrie, the worldly sophisticate from down the street; Emily, Marion’s adoptive daughter, and her two girls themselves; the women of the Coloured Ladies Club; the flock at the Union United Congregational Church; railway porter and union organizer Otis; and Poppa Dad. It’s about the provincial citizens of Chatsworth, Quebec; the francophone butcher’s boy from across the way; the Scottish manager where Marion works; the Russian emigrés at the ballet school; and a well-meaning if stubbornly race blind feminist in Westmount. Marion takes care of all of them and they look after her girls and her in turn.

In No Crystal Stair readers are introduced to Montreal through many characters’ eyes. Here’s Redd Foxx’s Montreal:

“It’s the Paris of the New World. They speak French, play hockey—and it’s got a great Negro nightclub! Canadians didn’t suffer during Prohibition—they prospered. It’s a racy town—you gotta see those de Montigny Street bordellos. Whoo-ee! Not many coloured folks there, though.”¹

Mairuth Sarsfield (1925–2013) was born and raised in Montreal, and over the years, she worked for CBC Canada, TV Ontario and CTV. She also worked for the Canadian External Affairs Department, where she was involved with Montreal’s Expo ’67. While working for the UN as senior information officer for the United Nations Environment Programme, she developed the “For Every Child a Tree” program. She received the Chevalier à L’Ordre National du Québec in 1985, and, in 1997, the National Congress of Black Women Foundation’s First Literary Award for No Crystal Stair.

Ru, first published in French and translated into English, is an autobiographical novel by Kim Thúy. In Vietnamese ru means lullaby; in French it is a stream, often a metaphorical flow of money, tears or blood. This is the story of a girl and her family who were among the many refugees who boarded boats to flee postwar Vietnam in the 1970s. They left in hopes of finding safer shores on the other side of very dangerous seas.

Kim Thúy tells her story in a series of vignettes that jump forward and back through the life of her protagonist, Nguyễn An Tịhn. An adult Nguyễn remembers how her family made landfall in Malaysia where they lived in a refugee camp until they were able to continue their journey to Canada. She remembers their plane landing in Montreal, where they were met by alien vistas of snow, and she remembers her younger self in nearby Granby navigating the ins and outs of lunch hours at the neighbours’, membership in an anglophone cadets corp, and after-school jobs. She remembers, too, the life in Saigon she and her family left behind and how it has informed the way she’s raised her own sons.

Much like memories breaking the surface of one’s mind only to bob down again, replaced with a memory from another time and place, Ru’s chapters, though short and out of sequence, organically assemble themselves into a life remembered. Kim Thúy’s writing is spare and objective, compelling readers to tap their own feelings when confronted with the dangers and kindness Nguyễn encounters rather than borrowing hers.

For readers who are learning French, this is a great read. I’d characterize myself as an intermediate-level reader, and this book’s short length, spare language, and short chapters combined with its beautiful writing and serious themes make it an accessible and engaging read for adult FSL readers.

Kim Thúy Ly Thanh arrived in Canada as a Vietnamese refugee in 1979 at the age of 10. Since then she’s worked as a vegetable picker, seamstress, cashier, food commentator, and restaurant owner. With her degrees in law and in linguistics and translation from the Université de Montréal, she has also worked as a lawyer, translator, and interpreter. Ru was her debut novel; she has since written À toi (with co-author Pascal Janovjak) and Mãn.

Kim Thúy’s first impressions ofMontreal: “It was a new birth really and that purity, you know, when you come from a country at war…with men in uniforms and curfews, and we didn’t see blood as such but still it was on our mind—that was the background of Vietnam. And then afterwards we were in the refugee camp in Malaysia and we were surrounded by dirt, basically, and [pit latrines] and when we got here it was all white from the plane and that purity really gave us a second birth.”¹

Serafim and Claire is a story about two people trying to escape the rigid social mores of the past to find passion in their single-minded pursuit of art. Claire flees the servitude of working for a rich Anglo family to dance on the stages of Montreal’s burlesque theatres, where she’s sure she’ll get noticed and swept away to glittering Hollywood or New York.

Serafim leaves Portugal to escape the stratified social circles that have shut the door against his misplaced ardour for an aristocratic young woman. He takes his portable Leica camera with him as he sails for a new world where people will surely appreciate the value of his candid action shots over stiffly composed portraiture.

But neither Claire nor Serafim can pursue the pure aesthetism of their art in the social roil of 1920s Montreal—they are buffeted on all sides by the realities of the post-war city. Sexual violence, Italian fascism, women’s suffrage, English-French tensions, abortion politics, police corruption, and poverty swirl around them, demanding their attention. Perhaps they could rise above it all with one daring scheme, but will their scheme cost them everything?

Montreal landmarks in Serafim and Claire: the Golden Square Mile, the red-light district

Mark Lavorato, grew up in the Canadian prairies, but as an adult he has travelled and lived in countries throughout Central and North America, the Caribbean, and Europe. He now lives in Montreal with his wife. In addition to being the author of several volumes of fiction and poetry, Lavorato is also a photographer, a passion he caught while researching the character of Serafim.

Lavorato on Montreal in the 1920s: “They were letting loose and it was this kind of party town. Of course, prohibition was happening in the United States in the 1920s and that meant there were huge trainloads of citizens who would come up from New York, Philadelphia, Boston just for the weekend to be able to party legally here in this…sinful city…. The politics were even more corrupt than they are now—there was free-flowing money and there were all kind of scams to make that money because of this strange mix of legal sin and illegal sin. And in this kind of naive time, there were also these incredibly naive idealists who came out of the swath of immigrants who were in the city, and they were proponents of big new ideas….”¹

In Nikolski Montreal is a migratory hub, a city where nomads wind up, at least for a time. They carry their histories with them, mapping their routes and their roots as they go. Joyce leaves the fishing village of Tête-à-la-Baleine, Quebec, to become a pirate… Noah arrives from the Canadian prairies to study (even if there is no program in International Roaming at the university)… And, following the needle of a broken compass, the sights of an unnamed bookseller reach far beyond the confines of his shop. Each of these wayfarers follows a different path, yet, like three separate books held together in one volume, they’re bound together. Nikolski has won a number of literary awards in both its original French and translated English editions.

Nicolas Dickner, novelist and short story writer, was born in Rivière-du-Loup. He’s travelled in Latin Americaand Europe, but ultimately returned to Quebecand now lives in Montrealwith his family. Dickner discussed the Montreal of Nikolski with Hannah Sung from the CBC Book Club: “Like most North American cities, we don’t feel like Montreal is a historic city, but what I discovered […] is that there is indeed a story […] lots of remains of those former skins of Montreal, but you have to look in a different way.”¹

Cockroach unfolds during a bitter Montreal winter. Its narrator, despite his de facto membership in a community of exiles, is utterly isolated and both fearful and desirous of human ties. As a master thief, he ties himself instead to people’s effects, using them to read the people he cannot trust. He skirts the edges of neighbourhoods, friendships, and drains, trying to stay warm and remain undetected. The story shifts back and forth between the narrator’s mainly nocturnal fossicking on chilly Montreal streets and remembrances of his troubled life in Lebanon. At first the narrator’s self-exile and suspicions make him seem alien and unknowable, but by deftly imperceptible turns Hage reveals a mind and heart as knowable as any other…which is to say barely knowable at all.

Rawi Hage grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus before moving to New York City and finally Montreal: he “arrived in the winter in the suburbs of Montreal and it was a bit of a shock.”1 At first Hage found the city to be remote and very different from New York, but once he began studying, the city grew on him considerably. During a recent stay as writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library, Hage said, “I must confess that my first love will always be Montreal. It is home to me. I’m a true Montrealer…”1

Deck, Jeff and Benjamin D. Herson. The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010. [ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59108-1]

So what do you do if you want to change the world and your superpower is a knowledge of grammar? If you’re Jeff Deck, you climb in your car; kit yourself out with chalk, markers, correction fluid, and a cowboy hat; and offer to fix people’s typos from sea to shining sea.

I wondered when I first opened this book if I was going to be following the adventures of a prescriptivist finger wagger trying to regain an imagined golden era of English by chiding and correcting the harried sign makers of the retail world. That didn’t sound like a very fun book to me. So I was happy to find that my fears were unfounded. Luckily Jeff Deck’s editing background means that while he knows his style guides, spelling conventions and grammar rules, he also knows that the these styles and spellings and rules vary from one time and place to another. His goal from the outset is to correct only those errors that are clearly mistakes and leave other variations alone.

Here's a typo I caught and released back into the wild.

So he and a series of stalwart co-correctors travel thousands of kilometres, tracing a circuit around the United States and ultimately finding a total of 437 typos* and correcting 236 of them, some by stealth, some with enthusiastic help, and some while vaguely hostile shopkeepers look on.